


Shiny, Sparkly Things

by Omnicat



Category: Darker Than Black
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Heaven's Gate War, Human/Contractor Relationships, Introspection, Rediscovering Your Emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-23 09:04:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4871059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He makes her feel like a greedy little magpie.</p><p>Or: Amber waxes poetic about her crush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shiny, Sparkly Things

It was more of a fixation than an observation and she knew it, but that didn’t make it any less true:

Hei was _different_.

Pai knew it, Amber knew it, Carmine and the rest knew it. Enemy squads hardly ever seemed to notice, but then they usually didn’t live long enough after meeting him to notice much of anything.

And Amber found herself _pitying_ them for it. Though glad her team had the boy all to themselves, Amber simply could not help but feel sorry for all those others who never got to see past the surface that said ‘enemy: don’t think, _kill_ ’.

She almost pitied herself too, sometimes.

When Hei killed, he was nothing so drab as a mere human or Contractor. He was a personification of death, the Black Reaper made flesh. He draped the wire around his victims’ necks as if it were a pearl necklace, buried his blades in their bodies like a lover sheathed himself in his beloved. But in return for that one moment of scorching intimacy, they forfeited the chance to bask, like Amber, in the eternal glow he emitted.

Surely, the butterflies in her stomach whispered whenever she watched him do it, a swift death would be a fair price to feel that touch, even if it meant never again to admire the incandescence that drew her to him in the first place. The irony of it did not escape Amber, and she often turned the thought around and around in her head, like a magpie admiring the shiny trinkets in its nest.

(There was a logical, obvious, biological reason for these feelings, but she could only laugh in the face of its inadequacy.)

Tracing the desire to its roots only uncovered more treasures. Admiration for exceptional skill and a well-trained physique in tight spandex were strange to humans nor Contractors, but the context of their lives of guerilla warfare and natural law gone mad stirred distant, hazy memories of shock and dismay that made her knees weak and her stomach queasy. And the little magpie Hei awoke in her was enchanted by her body’s gut reactions, treasured every glimpse of them.

At first glance, there wasn’t anything special about him. Plain black hair, sullen Asian features, a lanky but well-toned body that stood out in no way amidst all the other well-toned bodies of South America’s mercenaries, and he moved with the powerful and stealthy grace own to all those who had survived the jungle this long. Those who had heard of him in report and rumour, the living legend of black death, easily overlooked what was right in front of them until it was too late.

His skills were certainly above average; with only wires, knives, and his bare hands, he’d gained and kept the upper hand in this war, this sub-tropical arena in which countless Contractors applied the full range of their powers for the sole purpose of destruction. But surrounded by men and women who killed with practised ease, to whom it was nothing to take the life of another sentient being, that wasn’t what made Hei stand out to Amber.

(She didn’t _know_ what it was. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t put her finger on it.)

Hei was like a beacon. Even the death he dealt out and the blood he left in his wake was bathed in a brilliant glow, casting shades of light and dark and ringing with a clarity that was absent from the dull, flat drone that made up the rest of the world.

Pai, the well from which all his passion sprung and the basin in which it gathered, was one lucky girl. He killed for her and cared for her and _lived_ for her. Hei’s life meant something special, somehow; to himself, to his sister, to Amber, even to those few opponents lucky enough to get to face him more than once. And no matter how often and easily he killed, the lives of others meant something to him in return.

Amber could explain in a hundred different ways why she valued her own life above all else, but in the end, she was perfectly aware that ‘life’ was just a jumble of glorified chemical processes, a base struggle for survival for the sake of survival. So what was it that Hei saw, beyond the hyper-rationally primitive state of mind that the Contractors around him had developed along with their powers? In hindsight, she understood the ignorance of her own human years, peaceful and pleasant and filled with intoxicating amounts of good fortune. But after all these years of fighting the way they had, it shouldn’t have been possible for Hei to still harbour such illusions as deeply as he did.

For all the miracles surrounding her, only Hei qualified for Amber’s definition of the word.

It really were his eyes that did the trick. Those eyes that looked at humanity’s most barren, futile nature, stripped of all illusion and pretense, and could still see the twinkling of the stars that guided them.

At least for now.

His eyes were like cracked pottery; impenetrable in theory, but spilling the burden he carried in plain sight of anyone looking closely enough. She wondered sometimes, with a distant urgency, how many more times she could catch him slipping before he fell in a way he couldn’t get up from anymore. And what, exactly, would be lost when he did.

His eyes were like mirrors; so clear that Amber imagined she could see herself reflected in them, and that the emotions in them were her own.

That _she_ could _feel_.

One-eye in the land of the blind. And Amber wanted nothing more than to follow him, even if he didn’t lead her anywhere. Even if he was stumbling in circles himself, not knowing where to turn to, struggling harder to keep his eyes open the longer he wandered among the blindfolded.

Impractical, illogical, un-Contractor-like as it was, Amber wanted to stare into Hei’s eyes all day long, wanted him to touch her, wanted to see life the way he did, wanted to touch _him_. He made the whole world feel different just by being in it.

One day, when the fighting reached its peak and the closure of Heaven’s Gate was fast approaching, she used her power to stop time and steal a kiss from him, hoping that the magic of that ancient gesture might transform her from a magpie who had to steal other people’s trinkets into a bright, shining creature like Hei.

It didn’t happen.

Inside the mist of her Contract he was as lifeless as the eyes of a Contractor and as meaningless as the myriad deaths to her name. When time resumed its course, taking some of her hard-won age with it, Hei’s eyes reflected nothing. The whirlwind of love and pain inside her was nowhere to be found in him.

She felt hurt. Stupid. Betrayed. Guilty. Embarrassed. Disgusted. Scared. Concerned, most of all.

But she _felt_.

That was the moment Amber realised that soaking up the warmth and light he emanated wasn’t enough. That somewhere along the way, she’d started to behave in ways meant to provoke a reflection in his eyes. That his touch was no longer worth it for her to lose his glow over. That standing by idly while he lost that precious vision was no longer an option. That her own killing and caring had gained a purpose.

She wouldn’t be satisfied until she could affect him the same way he affected her. Not until _he_ kissed _her_.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments on older fics will _always_ remain welcome. :)


End file.
